Welcome to "The Cognitive Bias Files", a newsletter exploring the fascinating intersection between psychology and technology.
Have you ever wondered why, despite your best intentions, you don’t always make the right decisions? Have you ever read a text multiple times without noticing errors, only for someone else to spot them instantly? Have you ever been driving and then, after a few minutes, realized you're heading in the wrong direction, as if you were on autopilot?
It feels like our minds are... bugged, right? Spoiler: It's not just a feeling, they really are!
We live in a really complicated world, and I don’t mean just nowadays. Our brains have to handle a lot of different signals from our senses, like what we see, hear, touch, taste, and feel in terms of balance, temperature, pain, hunger, fullness (and much more).
In order to deal with this complexity, our brains take shortcuts: interpolations, heuristics, and mental optimizations to process the endless flow of information around us. It’s a bit like how a JPEG encoder compresses images: efficient, but there is a loss of information. It filters everything that could be filtered in order to keep only the necessary information.
But sometimes, what is discarded is too much, and problems then arise. Especially in today's modern world, where the amount of information is much greater than in the past. This is especially true if you work as a software developer, where you have to communicate in an unambiguous way to a computer (that is, write software) and manage complex systems.
And I’ll be honest: this newsletter is partly an excuse. I’m not a psychologist or researcher, I'm just a tech enthusiast who became curious. I wanted to explore why intelligent people (including myself) often make irrational decisions in code, projects, and life in general. I started this project as a way to motivate myself, and I’m excited to share that journey with you. So please cheer for me.
Why This Newsletter Exists?
After years in tech, I realized something important: we spend huge amounts of time learning new languages, frameworks, and tools, but almost no time learning how we ourselves think. We optimize our code, but not our brains.
In this newsletter, instead, we will do just that, one bias at a time.
Each post will explore a cognitive bias that affects how we design, build, and work together in the tech world. We’ll mix light theory with practical, real-life examples.
We’ll explore the biases that most often mess with our daily work, such as:
- The Curse of Knowledge: when expertise makes you bad at explaining
- Anchoring and Confirmation Bias: when your first idea becomes your only idea
- The Planning Fallacy: when “it’ll take two days” becomes two weeks
- Automation Bias: when you trust the system a bit too much
And much more. This isn’t about blaming or judging. We all fall into these traps, that’s what makes us human. The goal is to understand how our brain works, so we can make better, more deliberate decisions.
Your Feedback Matters
Have you spotted these biases in your own projects? Do you have stories or examples worth sharing? Leave a comment or send me a message. I’d love to hear real cases from the field and your experiences in general. The comment section will be a nice place where continue the discussion about biases.
Conclusion
Technology evolves faster than ever, but human psychology hasn’t had a firmware update in centuries. By learning to recognize our cognitive “bugs,” we can become better developers, teammates, and leaders.
The goal isn’t to eliminate biases: that’s impossible. The goal is to see them, name them, and work with them.
So, welcome aboard. Let’s start debugging our brains, one bias at a time.
🤝 Written by a human (me) with some AI assistance. Don’t worry, the biases are still 100% human.
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